I arrived at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year expecting AI to dominate every conversation. Instead, the conversations kept coming back to creators.
Scott Galloway noted that there were more creators at Cannes this year than in the past. Adobe’s CMO/EVP Lara Hood Balazs spoke about reorganizing around the belief that everyone is a creative, breaking down the traditional boundaries between creative and non-creative teams. Friends at UTA described how creators increasingly own distribution, and how editorial thinking has become central to helping those voices connect with audiences.
At first that felt like a shift away from the expected topic of AI. But the more panels, chats, and events I attended, the more I understood the conversation was circling what AI transformation leaves unresolved. Creating content is becoming dramatically easier. Distribution is decentralizing. More people, and more AI systems, can participate in telling a brand’s story.
Narrative clarity is a company’s clear sense of who it is, who it serves, and what stays true no matter who is telling the story. As company stories multiply, that clarity gets harder to hold onto. This isn’t about staying on-message, or repeating the same stress-tested taglines across every platform. Clarity doesn’t come from repetition. It comes from every part of an organization understanding the mission well enough to tell it in their own voice, without losing the thread.
That idea sharpened during a session with author and podcaster Mel Robbins. She talked about being a ruthless gatekeeper for your audience: Understand how they think, how they search, reverse-engineer the questions they’re already asking, then build from there.
It’s simple advice. But it’s a reminder that the strongest narratives don’t start with what an organization wants to say. They start with what an audience needs to hear.
That’s editorial thinking, maybe the most valuable skill a company can build right now.
“The organizations that thrive will be the ones whose story remains recognizable as it travels, not the ones just producing the most content.”
For years, brands controlled their own storytelling. Now that story moves through executives, employees, creators, customers, partners, and AI tools, and every handoff is a chance for the narrative to strengthen or fragment. The organizations that thrive will be the ones whose story remains recognizable as it travels, not the ones just producing the most content.
The creator economy and AI are accelerating the same shift. An organization with real narrative clarity turns these tools into multipliers, reaching people through more voices and formats. Without that clarity, they just produce more versions of the same uncertainty.
I left Cannes inspired by the creativity on display. What stayed with me was this: In a world where creating, publishing, and amplifying keeps getting easier, the organizations that know who they are, and who they’re trying to serve, will have the competitive advantage.
